Odes to Joy

A Verbal Fig Leaf · Track 43 · middle

Booba

Booba (2020s) — Internet baby-talk. A 700-year retreat into goo-goo. VOLUME: V. THE ALGORITHM, 2000–2025. THE DODGE THIS ERA: ⭐ THE PAYOFF. The censor is no longer a person, a church or a drawing room — it is a MACHINE that does not laugh, cannot be charmed, and never leaves the room. So the evasions get shorter, dumber and faster: initials, misspellings, emoji. Not because anyone got less filthy — because the filter reads faster than we can be clever. The volume must be genuinely funny and quietly devastating. Sing the AVOIDANCE, never the anatomy.

No audio yet — generation pending.

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
I am all sharp angles at the glowing glass,
Slipping a standard ten-eighty square past
The silent sentry in the server farm.
It doesn't have a heartbeat I can charm,
Just an index of strings it is programmed to seek.
My thumb hesitates, sensing the streak
Before the brain even registers the slip.
I bite the edge of my lip.
Backspace.

[Chorus]
We used to build a metaphor of ivory and snow,
A marble architecture just to put on a show.
But the machine reads too fast for a parlor game,
So we give the curve a different name.
Just two soft blocks of a toddler’s sound,
Something heavy and harmless and round.
Booba.
We beat the system by crawling back to the crib.

[Verse 2]
I could write a sonnet, but the scraper stops
At the fourth line, and the shadow-ban drops.
A poet had the afternoon to be polite,
I have three seconds in the blue-screen light
To name the softest geometry in the frame
Without tripping a wire I can't quite name.
So I flatten the vowels. I widen the O.
I speak to the supercomputer extremely slow.

[Chorus]
We used to build a metaphor of ivory and snow,
A marble architecture just to put on a show.
But the machine reads too fast for a parlor game,
So we give the curve a different name.
Just two soft blocks of a toddler’s sound,
Something heavy and harmless and round.
Booba.
We beat the system by crawling back to the crib.

[Bridge]
They say Kiki is the jagged edge, the breaking of the ice.
I am Kiki at the keyboard, making the sacrifice.
The algorithm loves a circle, a bouncing ball,
So I type the nonsense to scale the wall.
Seven centuries of wit, compressed into a shape.
An infant's babble is our only escape.

[Outro]
Upload complete.
The scanner finds nothing but a nursery toy.
We are so very advanced.
Shaking our rattles in the digital dark.
While the loading bar hangs at ninety-nine.
Pick a song